Legal Commentary

Sotomayor Hearing Live Blog, Day 2, Blog 2

By Big Tent Democrat

Senator Whitehouse should provide something of interest.

Apparently, being boring and uninteresting is the Dem strategy today. So I am going to return to the politics of the Sotomayor hearings. Matt Yglesias writes:

Consider the case of Jeff Sessions (R-AL). We’re talking about a guy who’s too racist to get confirmed as a judge, but just racist enough to win a Senate seat in Alabama. And it’s not because Alabama is a lilly white state. With 65 percent of its electorate white, and 29 percent of its electorate African-American, Alabama is much more demographically favorable to the Democrats than is the country at large. But while McCain pulled 55 percent of the white vote nationwide he scored 88 percent of white vote in Alabama. And this is what you tend to see in the Deep South, white Americans exhibiting the kind of high levels of racial solidarity in voting behavior that you normally associate with African-Americans in the US political context.

(Emphasis supplied.) It is certainly possible that in the South and in places like Utah and Idaho, the GOP can get 95% of the whote vote. But that will not provide the GOP any political benefit. I'll explain on the flip.

Because of the Voting Rights Act, there are districts across the country, but in particular in the South, that are "majority-minority" districts where minorities are highly likely to win the seat (think about the indicted William Jefferson in Louisiana. While he lost his seat in 2008, his GOP opponent is almost certainly going to lose the seat to a Democrat in 2010.)

Running up the score among white voters in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and other parts of the South will not get the GOP any more seats (or electoral votes in a Presidential election.)

Unless the GOP can convince young white voters across the Nation and especially, young white women, to adopt their views on race, sexual orientation and women's rights (a very unlikely prospect imo) - then outside of the South - the Sessions KKK approach is going to lose votes for the GOP everywhere else but the South and other GOP bastions like Idaho, Wyoming and Utah.

It simply can not work. So why do it? Because the Republican Party has become a rump party unable to escape the grasp of its racist, bigoted, hateful base.

Since 2004, I have trumpeted a political strategy I labelled a Lincoln 1860 strategy. Now more than ever, that strategy is a winning one for the Democrats. And Republicans are playing their part.

Senator Kaufman asks about application of economic thoery to antitrust law. Sotomayor simply gets the answer wrong - whe says the Court has not. That is flat wrong. Clearly she is not well versed in antitrust law.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 15, 2009 (boomark / email).